I am delving into another world, a world where some women permanently live as if nothing else exists, nothing else matters, nothing else is worth discussing. While the masculine gender inhabits a parallel universe of political thuggery and arguments, of sports and Premier League tables and betting slips, women inhabit this other empire of gossip, relationships, marriages and who took whose husband.
Both man and woman live close to one another, every day, almost every minute, yet they could be worlds apart.
This morning before going out, I found my wife watching Mata A Yau on Arewa 24, that 9 to 10am weekday ritual, and I teased her, “you women have started gossiping this morning?” She burst into laughter. It was harmless, but it is part of this woman-world that many men never pay attention to, especially the mean online warfare that has dominated the digital space for years, centered on the Pete Edochie family, which has again created two warring camps of for and against since actress Judy Austin Yul-Edochie visited the court recently. The exchange that follows is between busy bodies, for and against, with the single rhetoric weapon: “husband snatcher.”
For context, Judy was in court on Monday, September 29th, at the High Court of the FCT, Abuja. She filed two separate defamation suits totaling over two billion naira, one against her ex-husband Emmanuel Obasi, demanding one billion in general damages and more in aggravated and exemplary damages for alleged defamation, and another against Yul’s aunt, veteran actress Rita Edochie, also for one billion naira, for repeatedly labeling her a husband snatcher.
The second case is the one that caused the drama. According to videos from the court premises, Judy arrived alone, without family, without Yul, without friends. Rita arrived with a retinue of fans, some reportedly flown in from abroad. Outside the courtroom, a crowd shouted, “Husband snatcher, who is taking her in-law to court?” Rita herself posted that day that Judy wants her to stop speaking about husband snatchers and that she will cry blood.
So the question must be asked sociologically: when does a woman actually snatch another woman’s husband?
It is purely mischievous to leave out the major character who has made his interest and choice public, which is Yul himself, without whose active consent and cohabitation Judy and Yul could never have become a couple, and then proceed to stigmatize a woman in the usual fashion that suggests a man cannot possibly be wrong, or that he is not in his right senses, or that he is under some spell.
This is what feminist scholars call patriarchal bargaining. As Deniz Kandiyoti argued in her classic theory of patriarchy, women often negotiate within a system that privileges men by turning against other women instead of confronting the male privilege itself. The man becomes an object to be stolen, like a handbag, rather than a moral agent who made a choice.
If Judy truly used charm or juju to snatch Yul from his first wife May, as the street narrative claims, is it not logical for the warriors to take their redemption fight to the church or to the shrine to claim him back, instead of flooding online media with the shouting match of husband snatcher, turning themselves into moral police and taking sides?
Social identity theory by Henri Tajfel helps explain this. People form in-groups and out-groups and derive self-esteem from attacking the out-group. In the Judy versus May online war, women who have never met either party fight a proxy battle for their own anxieties about marriage.
This is not limited to celebrity quarrels. It is common to see women ignore their own husbands who pursue another woman and instead begin to pursue the fellow woman as the culprit, issuing threats of “leave my husband alone” when the woman obviously has no case if they had control over their own homes.
Psychologists call this displacement and victim blaming. Research by Melvin Lerner on the just-world hypothesis shows that people prefer to blame a visible, vulnerable target than confront the painful reality that their partner chose to leave. It is self-deception, a way to cover a wounded ego or to mask powerlessness over the man. The belief becomes that harassing the other woman could somehow help.
Yet I have seen the reverse, equally revealing, where men catch their cheating wives and spare the wife while committing homicide against the male lover. It is the same logic, simply leaving in denial, being subjective by pushing blame onto the outsider while indirectly making excuses for the partner or relative, as in the case of Yul being treated as doing nothing wrong.
Do not think this is a children’s fight. Rita Edochie is old enough to be a grandmother, yet she is shouting husband snatcher both online and offline, turning social media into two camps of warriors between Judy supporters and her supporters.
Erving Goffman would have called this the dramaturgy of everyday life, where social media becomes the stage and everyone performs morality for an audience.
There is really nothing like husband snatcher since there is no obvious case of abduction or imposition. Marriage, cohabitation and relationships, however controversial, involve mutual understanding and consent between two adults.You cannot blame and stigmatize one party while protecting the relative or partner as an innocent victim.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has repeatedly argued, the language we use about women reveals how we police them while excusing men. After all, if snatching is possible, you also have all the right to snatch the man back, woman to woman, rather than creating a villain out of a victim simply because she is the woman you can fight, while sparing the man as innocent.
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
